XC Browse

The modules's purpose is to provide a user interface, where the user can browse records. It has an administrator interface, where the library can create or modify the elements and the operations of the UI.

The library can create multiple browse pages, each one can contain multiple content panes or tabs. Each such tab has three parst: a form, an optional navigation bar, and the result list. In the package there are some browse UI examples.

How to create new browse UI?

concepts

The parts of the browse UI settings in a hierarchical way:

browse UI definition
|
o-- tab
     |-- form element(s)
     o-- navigation list(s)

Browse UI definition: this is the outermost part of the definition, this means the whole browse page. Every page should have at least on content pane. If you have more content pane, they are listed as tabs on the page. Each content pane can have two parts: a form, and one or more navigation lists.

The form contains form elements: text fields, selection, radios, checkboxes.
Some of these can be prepopulated by values from Solr, or you can add your own values.

The hard part is the content of 'The facet which populates the element'
field, because it has an own (still) undocumented syntax:

1) values:=All|videocassette=VHS ONLY|videodisc=DVD ONLY
means, that you set the values by hand. You should have a key=value
pairs separated by '|' character. (The fist key is empty, it means, that the
search won't filter by this field).

2) facet:creator_author
means, that you will list the values of the creator_author facet.

When I created this module I concentrated on the functionality, i.e.
how the module can build the UI from the user entered value, and
didn't take up the question of the usability of admin UI. This will be
a next task. In the next week I will add three more example into
the code.

of a browse page with four content panes: the Drupal path is xc_browse/dvd.
The settings of this page is available here:
eXtensible Catalog (XC) > Browsing > view (xc/browse/1)

I will write a more elaborated documentation about this in the next week, but for now it is a short guidance: